Yesterday, most of my friends were playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. While joining them was my original plan, when my girlfriend, Catherine, asked that we have a date night, that plan quickly changed. So we went out for dinner, visited for awhile, and then returned home to continue our playthrough of LEGO Jurassic World.

Catherine and I started seeing each other in April and on our first date, she impressed me by correcting me on a piece of Super Mario World minutiae (which I had just been playing). She has an older brother so she played games with him up through the Super Nintendo era but got away from them apart from the occasional singing games or Mario Party with friends. But she knows how much games mean to me so we talked about playing together.

Eventually, I'll introduce her to games like The Last of Us or my all-time favorite Final Fantasy VI, but to re-acclimate her, I figured we'd start with one of the LEGO games and Jurassic World won out (I've already gotten the platinums on the other recent games so I might as well get some trophies out of this, too). The LEGO games have always been charming by design so it seemed like a nice entry point for her.

So last night we continued our game by diving into the last mission of Jurassic Park III. These games are great for us to play together because we can just mess around, smash pretty much everything in a level for studs, and visit, rather than focusing on any kind of difficult gameplay. When we do have to co-operate to get through the simple puzzles and platforming, we're developing our gaming communication with each other, even if it's just "hey, honey, I need you to come jump on this thing so we can move on." Rather than fooling around in Free Play mode once we finished the Jurassic Park III portion of the game, we continued straight on to Jurassic World, mostly because we'd both gotten a little frustrated of trying to find a gold brick but not having the character with the right abilities to unlock them. So at this point we're finishing up the Story Mode so we'll have the full suite of characters and abilities.

In the coming days, we'll go through the Free Play mode of the levels and I'll explain the idea of the "collectathon" aspect of the game as we work through all the rest of the 275 gold bricks. She watched me play through Arkham Knight and all of those damn Riddler trophies so she understands it, now I'm just going to make her suffer through it with me. Mwahaha! She even thinks she's "excited" about it. How naive...